but leave the soul alone
by the milliner's rook
Summary: AU. Death, it's catching. Or: the one where Toushirou and Karin share night shifts at the hospital. And coffee. Terrible, terrible coffee.


"Death," Karin says, her black hair tied up today, and hands him a cup of coffee, "it's catching."

"No." He says, as he pulls up a chair.

"_Yes."_ She says, as he sits down.

Toushirou accepts the coffee anyway.

It's 3am and he has a resident nightshift dweller for company in the hospital's cafeteria.

It's 3am, and that means he has three hours left before he can leave the hospital and be spared from the weird musings of a lunatic.

It's 3am, and he should be _asleep._

It's a foolish trap he's walked himself into, unwittingly becoming friends with Kurosaki Karin of all people, but she's given him a desperately needed cup of coffee and he's grateful, but still he's of no saner mind.

"Alright." Toushirou prepares himself, and gives in. The coffee may be terrible, but it's a kick, and that's something at least. He has a few more seconds before the aftertaste makes its unwelcome arrival. "Say it again."

Karin grins, teeth dazzlingly white. "Death, it's catching."

It's just as terrible the second time around.

Toushirou groans, free hand covering his eyes. He doesn't want to look at her. "You should be ashamed of yourself."

"I'm hilarious." She says with conviction, like the idiot she is.

"You're a _mortician._ You're not supposed to make jokes." He tells her sternly, and Karin has the nerve to roll her eyes at him.

"Oh c'mon, I have a _graveyard shift_ 24/7. I work with the dead. How am I not supposed to make jokes?" She tosses a biscuit in the air, and catches it with her half-drank cup. Her neck sticks out, as she leans towards him conspiringly, elbows on the table, and he knows what's going to happen before it does. True to his prediction, she whispers loudly. _"I can see dead people."_

"That's not even a good movie!" He exclaims, outraged, and rolls his eyes at her.

"It is an _excellent _movie. You were just spoiled." Karin insists, and Toushirou grumbles into his cup.

He _was_ spoiled. But he still didn't think it was as good as people said it was.

"Besides, it's not like I see you make any good surgeon jokes, sawbones." Karin looks at him, not impressed.

"That's because I don't want to make surgeon jokes." He snipes back, feeling much grouchier and saner already. Most people would probably feel insane with the combination of the night shift, Karin, and bad jokes. Not Toushirou. But terrible coffee and exposure to her antics tends to make Toushirou more rational-minded. It's also because he doesn't know any. Even if he did, he wouldn't tell her. He'd just grumble and tell her to go away because it's _ridiculous._ He wouldn't want to tell surgeon jokes to _anyone._ "And don't call me that."

"What, sawbones?"

He ignores her. "Out of all the possible puns you choose, you make that one your catchphrase?"

"Hey! It's not a catchphrase!" Karin objects, huffing. "It's a pick up line!"

Toushirou stares at her.

"… come again?" After he's stopped being rendered speechless, and trying to process the words he's certain he heard, Toushirou gives up.

"Well, not on _you_." Karin snorts and rolls her eyes, her foot nudging his. "That would be dumb. _Obviously._ I'm saying: it's a potential pick up line that will work wonders someday and make people want to date me."

He lifts an eyebrow. "They'll think you're morbid."

"And when they find out that I'm a mortician, they'll think I'm hilarious." Karin continues as if he hadn't said a word.

He shakes his head, disproving. "They'll think you're creepy."

"I could be all three." She insists.

"Morbid and creepy, yes." He agrees without a doubt. That's an easy conclusion like gazing outside and still being able to see the stars at this time of night. Doesn't mean he likes it. "Hilarious, not so much."

It's been three years, and he still hasn't let go of the fact that their first meeting consisting of her calling him 'skeleton man' and 'the living dead'. A particular favourite was when she yelled 'go back to my kingdom for I have not yet summoned the undead to walk!' And that was how he discovered that she was a mortician.

It wasn't even Halloween.

It's a compliment, he supposes, in some ways, to know that he's the prettiest skeleton she's ever seen. That imagery has cropped up a few times during her drunken phone calls. He's never had the heart to ask her about it, shrugging it off and deciding that it's one of her quirks. It's not quite a compliment when he hears that she makes the same admission to fish bones that she sketches from time to time.

"Yeah, well, you like me anyway." Karin mutters, and digs into her midnight snack.

"More than this coffee, at least." He shrugs. His stomach rumbles and he starts to eat.

"This coffee is awful." Karin makes a face.

He nods, taking her statement very seriously indeed, and swallows. It's important to talk with no food in his mouth.

"Yes."

* * *

Karin leaves post-it notes in his pockets. She slips them in when he doesn't notice, and he's too damn tired to care. It doesn't matter that he's walking as slowly as a zombie to his car, it doesn't matter if he gets one last cup of that awful, _awful_ cafeteria coffee to help him make it through the morning traffic of bubble brained bunnies, Karin has sneaky fingers, definitely, he knows, and he never catches her in the act.

Maybe she slips them in with the feat of paper airplanes.

He's never actually asked, and he's too sluggish to remember his increasingly sleep-deprived thoughts.

He never really remembers getting home. Toushirou has vague recollections of stumbling to his apartment like an automaton with sparking circuits, bumping into walls and doorjambs and then crashing in his bed.

When he wakes, his first instinct is to check his lab coat. It might be his first instinct, but at such an ungodly hour, he needs motivation that is not nearly as compelling as sleeping for another hour. Which he usually does. Because slumber is a gift that he will always be grateful for.

No complaints. No stressful situations. Just sleep.

And a crumpled note mysteriously left in his pocket that he will not bother to check until he has a fully functioning brain.

He loves sleep.

… but then there's that pesky note to consider.

With a sigh, his face still planted in his pillow, he moves his hand and finds it buried exactly where it always is.

He's awake, Toushirou tells himself, and doesn't believe it. He's awake.

With great effort, he cracks an eye open.

_Let's go get coffee today!_

The note is obnoxious and horrible and he prays that it's too late to even be considered morning. It is very much a Kurosaki Karin note and he hates it as much as he hates the sun at this moment in all its radiance and bright eyed madness.

Why doesn't she just _text?_

* * *

Only a mortician would wear a skeleton outfit on her days off. That mortician could only be Kurosaki Karin.

What's even more jaw-dropping is that her ringtone is Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre.

He honestly doesn't know anyone with a worse sense of humour, and she'll beam sunnily like she hadn't spent earlier this morning cracking jokes with the other crew of morbid fiends who probably routinely plot out ways to rob graves and take over the world with their stupid puns and their even stupider science fiction plans of raising the dead. Why they even work at the hospital is beyond him.

But the most important thing is the skeleton bones imprinted on her clothes.

It's a tantalizingly asinine and he should be sleeping.

"I should be sleeping." Toushirou tells her grumpily, and Karin merely grins. "Why are you so obsessed with death?"

"Death is a family business." Karin tells him easily, then pushes him towards the café and through the door, her arm slipping into his. "You know this."

"Doesn't stop me from questioning it." Rolling his eyes, he still doesn't want to believe it. It doesn't matter if Karin tells him of the constant coffins scattered across her childhood home, or the times where her siblings had to tread carefully across a sea of even more coffins and hope that the one they just stepped on didn't contain her father underneath or they'd scream when the coffin began to move. That is, of course, before her older brother lost patience and started stomping on them all. Yes, he'd heard the stories. No, he didn't believe them. "I really should be sleeping."

"It's midday. Now, what are you in the mood for?"

"_Sleep." _Toushirou mumbles, tempted enough to doze on her shoulder.

Karin ignores him. "Coffee it is." She flicks his collarbone. "Hey, have you eaten today?"

"I ate an apple." He tells her, bluntly, mind still groggy and blissfully blank.

She tuts. "Well that won't keep morticians away, that's for sure."

He blinks. Even in his sleep-addled mind that's wrong. "Did you just—"

"Yes."

"_No."_

Then she directs him to a table which he will save by sitting and glaring at everyone who even thinks about approaching him. Including Karin.

Who just _desecrated_ a _common_ _saying_ in favour of her profession.

He is given a muffin. It has sprinkles and it sparkles.

"I hate you."

"Yes, I know you do." Karin laughs, and places his coffee on the table. "That's why I'm extra nice and get you coffee."

It's a trap.

In the end, it always is.

He realizes this when he's more awake, knows it and bemoans his fate, and Karin is still grinning like an idiot at him, before she wipes the cream off her lips, still in that ridiculous skeleton gear. He glances at her suspiciously, not trusting her feigned innocence for a second.

"… what is it?"

"My cunning plan, you mean?" She raises her eyebrow, and Toushirou grudgingly concedes. Not because it is cunning, but because she has a plan, and she has once again bribed him with coffee. And muffins.

"Yes. That." He frowns at her, aided by the menace of insomnia and scruffy hair.

"It's simple, really." Karin really shouldn't look so insufferably pleased with herself. Or perky. There's must be a secret to her surviving the night shifts as often as she does, and being able to act like she hasn't suffered through the end of the world like he has, still a little bit wild-eyed and twitchy. "I want you to use a pick up line using your profession."

"_Why._" He doesn't even state it as a question. It just is. Coffee and muffins can take this friendship of theirs only so far.

"Because I'm doing it too." She informs him, like she hadn't already this morning and he wishes in vain that there was something Karin didn't get obsessed with and didn't drag him with her. Besides his imperviousness to skeletons.

"That's your choice." He mutters, chest heaving with a mournful sigh.

"Yeah, but it'll be fun if we both do it."

"Do you have to include me in your hare-brained schemes?" Irritably, he snaps. Caffeine in his body or not, the fact remains that he's still sleep deprived and it's horrible trying to fix his sleep cycle. He's going back to sleep. "Later, Karin."

* * *

It doesn't mean that he doesn't think about it.

Against his will, that is.

It is, and will always be, a stupid idea.

Pick up lines don't work. That's the point. They're meant to be shot down the minute they are heard. Pick up lines get put down. He stops his train of thought before they can possibly breach the line lines of puns and a lukewarm theory of why Karin might possibly be interested in them.

That doesn't stop him from buying two cups of the most awful coffee cups in existence and handing one of them to Karin the next time they share a night shift the next week. It's tradition, after all. 3am and all it's madness.

"I'm a surgeon." He says bluntly, heat rising on his cheeks. "Do you know what they say about surgeons?"

"What?" Karin grins, humouring him with a glint in her eyes, like she already knows and she wants to hear him say it out loud.

"We have legendary hands."

And it's _awful._

Truly awful.

Karin laughs anyway, pretty black hair tumbling past her shoulders, like it's the funniest thing she's heard. She laughs like she can't believe he actually said that.

"Your execution is terrible_._" She says eventually, grinning lopsidedly, like she's ever so proud of him, and takes a sip. "But we can work on that."


End file.
